Modern automotive ECUs (ECU—Electrical Control Unit) will integrate more and more functionality. This trend is driven by the technology scaling on one side, enabling a high level of integration and by the highly cost driven nature of the automotive industry that forces to reduce the total number of ECUs per car. Electronics play an increasing role in providing advanced driving assistance functions and especially in preventing hazards that will reduce the number of fatal injuries.
The integration of functions inside an ECU is mainly concentrated around a multi-CPU microcontroller that plays a critical role by hosting the critical computation and control functions. Such microcontroller can be seen as a cluster of computation nodes with defined and encapsulated tasks. Under such assumptions failure isolation is a main concern to address, it influences all the building blocks of the safety architecture.
The key issue with the growing complexity of automotive ECU and with the focus on ISO26262 is that automotive ECUs shall be able to provide uninterrupted service, not only for minor error but also for errors classified as critical today.